


Dream a Little Dream of Me

by hopeless_eccentric



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Fluff, Junoverse | Juno Steel Universe, Married Couple, Sleepy Cuddles, Tenderness, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, i cant believe vesbud invented love, i present to you SLEEPY VESPA, just. love and support and. man, like this is genuinely the softest thing ive ever written, this might be the softest thing ive ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28663122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeless_eccentric/pseuds/hopeless_eccentric
Summary: “Darling,” Buddy began after a moment. “Is there something I should worry about with my heart?”“Nothing new,” Vespa shrugged. “Why?”“Well, I thought I ought to be a little worried with my doctor spending so much time listening to it.”The same sweet smile that threatened to tie Buddy’s metallic ventricles into a knot blessed Vespa’s face again.“I’m not listening to your heart as your doctor, Bud,” she yawned. “I’m listening as your wife. Just ‘cause you’re real, and I don’t ever wanna forget that. You’re alive, I’m alive. Looks like we made it.”
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay
Comments: 28
Kudos: 55





	Dream a Little Dream of Me

**Author's Note:**

> this is.........so somft.........gird your loins
> 
> Content warnings for mentions of nightmares, discussion of troubled sleeping

Most of the time, Vespa slept like she didn’t deserve a wink of it. On days when her work in the medbay kept her awake through long hours that even kisses and sweet nothings, and, when all else failed, the Captain’s orders, couldn’t convince her to shorten, her rest was taken in chairs in frequent, timed bursts. As far as Buddy knew, it seemed her wife had honed sleep into a mechanical art.

It had been worse when Vespa still spent her nights tossing and turning in bed, waking with shouts and scrabbling hands that rent at the bed sheets until she could find something to hang onto. Her wild eyes would only soften when Buddy held her face and whispered gentle, meaningless things into her hair. 

Some days, Buddy couldn’t be sure if she slept at all. She didn’t yawn so evidently as Rita or grow as overly affectionate as Ransom when weighed down by her exhaustion. Until she learned the mathematics behind calculating just the perfect amount of worry, all she could do was try to mold her distress into blaster shots in the makeshift firing range and try to shoot it away.

Eventually, with time and patience and a moment to catch their breaths, Buddy began to put the right variables in the right places. The matter required a significant amount of time, but Buddy knew every minute was well worth the trouble. She was all too willing to pen a starmap by hand and perfect the navigational calculations if it meant Vespa could find her way home for good.

Buddy never feared that some part of the desert had claimed Vespa for itself. Regardless of what Vespa whispered in those late night confessions across the pillow or pressed into Buddy’s chest, she knew well that Vespa was not a shade of her former self, nor was she broken or in any way hollowed out. She was an entire woman who just happened to have been hurt.

However, she knew for a fact a part of the desert had left with Vespa. Buddy didn’t doubt it was the same reason she slept light and when she could.

Sand, however, had a way of scattering with time. Even if grains gathered here and there and rubbed uncomfortably or made activities that were usually normal painful, they could be worked around. Exceptions could be made. Careful steps could be taken.

After a while, the sand scattered far enough that when a strange, albeit not unpleasant dream shook Buddy from a sleep, she found Vespa’s arms tight around her waist and their foreheads still pressed together from dozing off halfway through a breathless and half-kissed conversation in which they mapped a future across the stars.

Buddy felt a ghost of one of those smiles flitting across her face at the feeling of Vespa’s wedding band pressing into her shoulder.

Ideally, she would have drifted back to sleep and found herself greeted by pleasant dreams, a waiting room of sorts until she came to reach a morning that was kinder than any of her mind’s fantasies. A part of her still did not believe that either of them were alive, nor that the woman holding her was not a ghost or dream or memory, but her wife, who had somehow fallen through the great, empty void of space and right into her arms.

However, the purple shadow of the desert sunset still bore its fangs in the corners of their quarters. A wedding would not heal the radiation damage upon Buddy’s face, nor would it ease Vespa’s mind when nightmares shook her from sleep. Time had offered a helping hand to both, though its grasp was weak and slippery. Buddy wasn’t sure the desert would ever leave them. That suspicion only became stronger when Vespa, always the light sleeper, awoke at the shifting of Buddy’s chest.

“Bud?” She mumbled, words slurred where her lip had caught on one of the buttons of Buddy’s sleep shirt. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing, darling,” Buddy smiled.

“Something had to have happened,” Vespa snorted. “You’re not just awake at whatever o’clock for shits and giggles.”

“A dream,” Buddy chuckled.

Though she was loathe to let her hand part company with its warm and tender home upon Vespa’s back, the soft sigh Vespa let out when the hand came to rest in her hair made the sacrifice well worth it. 

“Something bad?” Vespa pressed. Buddy felt her face fall against her sternum, and as if triggered by a physical force, something softened right below that point of contact.

“Nothing bad, Vespa,” Buddy whispered back, her words too growing muffled as she kissed them into the top of Vespa’s head. “In fact, I don’t remember it at all.”

“Are you just saying that so you won’t have to admit that you want me to hold you?”

“Vespa, my darling,” Buddy began slowly. A chuckle made her voice waver as she spoke, and before she could even continue on, Vespa let out her own soft, breathy laugh into Buddy’s arms. “If I wanted you to hold me, I would have asked. I know you’d be all too willing.”

“See, you sound like you’re teasing me,” Vespa snorted. “But I’ve just gotta wonder, for what? Being in love with my wife?”

Buddy opened her mouth for a retort, albeit a gentle one, as she knew well she couldn’t deliver any proper barb until she was far less likely to yawn her way through it. However, Vespa started laughing in earnest before she could so much as make a noise, so her parted lips pressed firmly shut in offense instead.

“Vespa, darling,” she began.

“I’m not making fun of you, Bud,” Vespa smiled, and for the first time all evening, raised her head.

Buddy couldn’t see why so many ancient cultures worshipped the sun, when surely, people such as Vespa Ilkay must have existed all throughout time. She doubted, however, that any of these hypothetical individuals held a candle to her wife, whose dark circles looked a little lighter with her newfound habit of sleeping in bed and whose hair was mussed in a sweet and tender way from when she tried to nuzzle her head a little closer into Buddy’s hand.

Even in the hazy purple of dark, Vespa’s smile shone like blaster fire.

“If not that, then what?” Buddy couldn’t help but smile in return, feeling the joking, half-asleep offense melt upon her lips.

“I called you my wife and your heart started pounding so loud it nearly blew my eardrum out,” Vespa chuckled, as soft and sweet as wedding bells.

“Well, perhaps you can call me your marital unit instead, and then you might put that poor device through a little less strain,” Buddy mused.

“Schmaltz can’t clog an engine, Bud,” Vespa all but beamed, though it was short lived.

Under any other circumstances, Buddy would have complained that Vespa had ceased smiling. However, it seemed she had seen fit to press a kiss as sweet as unions and reunions and sunsets and new horizons into her lips, sealing it like a promise she only broke when she had to lean back for air to press a murmur of Buddy’s name into her lips.

“Vespa,” Buddy heard herself breathe, soft and sweet and half asleep into the gentle velvet night stretching on the few, cruel inches between them.

Vespa seemed to take note of this great crime and closed the space between them, though instead of leaning into another kiss, she folded over to rest her head upon Buddy’s chest, an arm across her waist pulling her close.

“Darling,” Buddy began after a moment. “Is there something I should worry about with my heart?”

“Nothing new,” Vespa shrugged. “Why?”

“Well, I thought I ought to be a little worried with my doctor spending so much time listening to it.”

The same sweet smile that threatened to tie Buddy’s metallic ventricles into a knot blessed Vespa’s face again.

“I’m not listening to your heart as your doctor, Bud,” she yawned. “I’m listening as your wife. Just ‘cause you’re real, and I don’t ever wanna forget that. You’re alive, I’m alive. Looks like we made it.”

Buddy paused for a moment to figure out just how to drape her arms back over her wife, settling with a hand to play in her hair while her other arm busied itself on her back, sometimes as a cradle and sometimes just to run a gentle line up and down the curve of her spine.

Sleep would settle on both of them in time, and Buddy was almost certain it would be a peaceful one. For the time being, however, she breathed. Vespa breathed too, and eventually, Buddy couldn’t be sure whose lungs had set the pace or when the sounds had become slow and gentle and even, broken only by yawns and sweet nothings until their second conversation of the night trailed away as kindly as the first.

**Author's Note:**

> MAN cant believe they invented love
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading!! Make sure to SMASH that kudos button and leave a comment down below or ill freeze all your spoons
> 
> Check me out on tumblr @hopeless-eccentric or on twitter @withane22 !!


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